A Found Belonging on the Lost Coast
Believe it or not, this photo is in color! And what it looked like most days on the Lost Coast February, 2015
The Whale and The Plankton
What a week on a rugged beach, and its creatures, taught me about finding my place in the world.
We each have a whopping 1,500-70,000 thoughts a day. That’s according to Google, and that’s a broad range of conjecture. For our purposes, it’s enough to know there’s a lot of crap cycling quickly through our heads at any given moment. I think it’s pretty safe to say, most of what our minds tell us is bullshit. We all have our favorite variations that repeat over and over and somehow sound new each time. A common one I have heard in my own head and around town: You don’t belong anywhere, and no one is ever going to accept you for who you are. We set about creative ways to prove these theories to ourselves, and the bullshit gets mistaken for truth. I feel very fortunate that, now, after many, many years of practicing discernment, I can call bullshit on these waves of thought. If you haven’t yet found where you belong, it’s not because you inherently don’t belong, it’s because you haven’t found it yet! Or perhaps the fates and muses are busy designing your unique way of finding it. I have learned unequivocally that everyone belongs somewhere. I know this because Life just says it is so. I know this because as humans, we are each agents of both choice and circumstance. I know this because you can do everything right and still have everything go wrong. I know this because suffering isn’t personal, and neither is joy. I know this because doing and achieving means nothing and being is all that matters in the scope of all things.
The Lost Coast of California taught me much about discerning the waves of my own mind during a chilly, foggy seven-day vision quest in the off-season there. The area is called the Lost Coast for a reason: It’s where the Pacific Coast Highway that moves up most of the coast of California ends because the terrain is too rugged to build a road through it. The sand runs right up to the edge of the mountains, so you have to time your movements with the tide or risk getting stranded—or worse, drowning. And the sand, I wouldn’t even call it grains, are big, more like legumes, with sharp glass edges that tear at your skin. I saw only one other person the whole time as he tore past my tent in the dark of night on his motorbike: scary, but I chose this spot for the solitude. And because it is one of the most achingly beautiful places I have ever known.
The quest was one ceremony in a bigger context of two years full of ceremony designed to dismantle the addictive parts of my nature. This deep, deep work endeavored to eradicate the very seeds of addiction themselves. Yes, addiction to all the various things and behaviors we might become addicted to, but more potently, to the qualities and states of being we become associated with that require the addictive behavior to perpetuate! All these ceremonies taught me that my particular flavor of addiction was to self-pity, suffering, and low self-worth. My own eating disorder/starvation addiction behavior was never really the problem.
This ceremony was particularly symbolic, representing the closing of my life chapters lived where the vibration most resonates with my being, the California coast, and preparing to begin my journey toward the next chapters on the East coast, where nothing about the vibration makes any sense to any part of me. Where I chose to do my vision quest was wild and imbued with the silence of total solitude. The design of the quest itself further built that quiet intensity in the way that fasting forces you to grow even more still and internal while somehow wonderfully not suffering. I am used to “doing” my way through life and through ceremony. This was one that gave space to enjoy the languor and perspective that having nothing to do but lounge on the lonely, rhythmic beach day-after-day creates. And it was confusing as Hell to me: There, on that beach, I wasn’t doing anything! There should be fireballs and laboring and gnashing of teeth to achieve this kind of transformation! Wasn’t I supposed to be doing stuff?! But no, it was just this quiet, bathed in beauty.
I miss that peace, but, try as the voices of pretense in my head might to profess otherwise, that quietness already resided inside me and was simply made manifest in the outer world in that place. I go back there every time I still my insides. Every time I practice. Every time I talk to God in nature. Every time I touch another Soul. Every one of those times, I belong.
Laying in the warm sun, listening to my heart pound, and watching the wee waves move in and out, I was pulled in to how friggin’ humongous the ocean is, and how friggin’ teeny-tiny this small self is next to it! I had the complete and total awareness of the weight of the water in front of me, the volume. How silly my insecurity and addiction to suffering was in the face of that infinite vastness. This was not a self-deprecating realization, for a change, but an opening inside me that saw my attachment to low self-worth for what it truly was: a lie about who I actually came to Earth to be, simply another human learning to experience love and joy in living.
In that moment, I felt my worth not in the enormous mystical magic of the whales in that ocean water as I might have expected, but in the itty-bitty millions of zillions of plankton. There was this very real, palpable sense of the whale, intent in its purpose, moving through water as Whale does, and then this breath-stopping awareness of how many plankton exist out there to feed this incredible beast. Big numbers tend to have a connotation of dispensability or less value. So many plankton, who would possibly care about just one? So many thoughts in one head, is it really necessary to examine each one? On that day, I was overwhelmed with awe at how much each and every one of those plankton matter to the whole. Not because they individually matter to the whale, the far cooler sparker of spiritual insight, but because they simply matter, in and of themselves. They matter because they just do. No one had to make it so, and not one of them had to play out the hero’s myth and surmount unbeatable tasks to make it so. It was simply, sweetly, beautifully, and purely so in the way of all things. I felt myself in that neededness, weighed in my own mind against countless humans who are far superior in ever more countless ways. I saw, no, I knew in the darkest corners of my being, that even within the gigantic population of humanity, and even on my most seemingly useless lay-around-on-the-couch days, I still matter. Not because of any thing at all, I just do. And so do you. The plankton are always there to remind me what an illusion self-misperception is; a play of the light in the murky waters and nothing more.
